A Fan's Look at Head Injuries and the Concussion Crisis in Football

In the News

It’s pretty easy for football to get an interested audience in official Washington D.C. Congress folk are no different than anyone else when it comes to love for the game. Some of the politicians played a little college ball, and a few of the elected officials even played in the NFL. Better yet, some of the D.C. decision-makers get paid to pay attention (through campaign contributions) if they are fortunate enough to be sitting on the right committees. But what happens when it’s family?

Seeming almost like the opening episode of a television reality show, the NFL’s Heads Up Advisory Committee met for the first time at NFL offices on May 3oth. The youth football committee is an eclectic group of folks including Whoopi Goldberg, Brett Favre and Mrs. Mike Golic. The group of 22 people includes mostly big name football celebrities that will make for nice NFL PR opportunities. 6 NFL TV broadcasters, 2 NFL wives, 2 NFL docs, 3 former NFL players not on TV, 7 regular type folks and 1 Oscar, Grammy and Tony award winning talk show host make up the youth football advisory committee.

Sports journalism is in fine hands if the Columbia School of Journalism’s sports website is any indication. Currently, the site features stories of nine different plaintiffs involved in the concussion litigation against the NFL. Every story, each written by a separate student contains unique insights about why the player is involved in the litigation and includes quotes from the players, teammates, friends and family members. What’s interesting about the articles is how straightforward and reasonable the players statements are. None of the these players seem to expect that they’ll ever receive much compensation from the lawsuit.

It’s hard enough to get team owners, coaches and the medical staff to recognize and appropriately treat a possible brain injury, but when the players themselves are afraid to admit an injury, it’s obvious we’re a far way from home, folks. You watch 22 year old RG3 suffer a concussion, fight to stay on the field, and then return to action the very next practice. You know it’s wrong, but the NFL needs him, the dude gets paid millions and besides, the docs say the kid passed a concussion test.

“No one would ask someone wearing a cast on their leg to run 10 miles, because we all know that’s dangerous. Just because you can’t see a concussion like you can see a cast, that doesn’t make it any less dangerous if you don’t rest it.”

Dr. Cynthia Stein of Boston Children’s Hospital routinely explains to patients that pro football players like Junior Seau may have taken thousands of hits to the head in youth leagues, high school and college — in addition to 10 or more years in the N.F.L.

Dr. Elliot Pellman is back in all of his glory. As immortalized in legal complaint after legal complaint in the 200 plus lawsuits against the NFL, the physician that most plaintiffs point to as the single largest source of bad info regarding the science of brain injuries is back. In fact, according to a story in SportsonEarth.com by journalist Patrick Hruby, he never left. In 2013, Pellman continues to be a top advisor to the NFL on the subject of brain injuries.

Bob Lilly is suing the NFL and Jerry Jones hasn’t mentioned it? And nobody’s even asked? For the April 9th courtroom showdown in Philly between the NFL and over 4,000 former players who are suing the league, the media spotlight was able to easily find lawyers, plaintiffs and families of plaintiffs. But in over a year of intense media coverage including TV pieces on CBS, HBO, ESPN, magazine articles in Sports Illustrated, Forbes, The Atlantic and a number of major market newspaper articles, the voice of the real defendant, the 32 NFL team owners, has been mysteriously absent.